Shortest-reigning popes:
1978 is called the “year of three popes”: Pope Paul VI was succeeded by John Paul I, who lived only 33 days. John Paul II succeeded him.
vicambulate
v. to walk about in the streets
“Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
The Mad Gasser of Mattoon was a mysterious figure who haunted Mattoon, Ill., in the summer of 1944.
Typically, homeowners would report awakening to a sweet odor, then feeling nausea, dizziness, headaches, breathing difficulty, or a feeling of paralysis. Some saw a tall figure dressed in black fleeing their property after the attack.
Police and citizens patrolled the streets, and the newspapers printed several sensational accounts, but the police never found a suspect. The attacks stopped after Sept. 13, as mysteriously as they had begun.
The longest word in the English language is FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION.
It means “the act of estimating (something) as worthless.”
Disneyland would fit in Disney World’s parking lot.
In 1945, Betty Lou Oliver plunged 75 stories inside an elevator when a B-25 bomber struck the Empire State Building.
Fourteen people died in the plane crash, but Oliver survived.
Someone make a note, in case we ever run out of power:
In 1990 the Internet Engineering Task Force proposed a way to send Internet messages by homing pigeon.
It was used — once — to transmit a message in Bergen, Norway.
Why do landmasses “sag” toward the south pole, as on the Sherwin-Williams paint logo? In 1973 Ormonde de Kay Jr., a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, proposed a “theory of continental drip”:
“Let’s look at the world map. Africa and South America … are textbook examples of drip, with their broad tops and tapering lower extremities. But so is North America, with Baja California and Florida dangling down at its sides, and Greenland, too, clearly shows the characteristics of drip.”
“What causes continental drip? A few possible explanations come to mind: some palaeomagnetic force, for example, unsuspected and therefore undetected, centered in massive, mountainous Antarctica and perpetually tugging at the lower hems of land masses. Or drip might somehow be the result of the Earth’s rotation, or of lunar attraction. One conclusion, however, would seem inescapable: contrary to the teachings of science, but as every schoolchild has always known, north really is up, and south down!”
A hapax legomenon is a word that occurs only once in a given body of text:
HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS appears only once in Shakespeare’s works (in Love’s Labour’s Lost). Probably a good thing.